Check this excerpt from an interview with George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, on the prescription drug manufacturers
YOU, your entity, is a commodity!
Quote:
Q: Year after year, we see health care costs rising faster than the rate of inflation. Why?
A: Health care costs are exploding, and there are about a dozen cost drivers. Everyone's looking for a simple solution, trying to find one culprit. There's a whole series of causes.
Some of them are obvious -- prescription drug costs are going up. They're about 14 percent of the health care dollar, and they're going up 10 to 20 points a year.
Q: Why are they rising?
A: The old business model was to develop drugs that would deal with specific sicknesses -- take that drug three times a day for 10 days, and you're cured. The new model is: Take the drug two times a day for the rest of your life. What's happening is there's an array of good drugs that make people's lives better, but they become a perpetual expense.
Q: Is this by design?
Part of it is by design. From the drug companies' perspective, a drug you take every day for the rest of your life is a better business model than a drug you take every day for two weeks and then you're done.
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